Guest 547 Wants To Go Home
by Mark Cornell
Summary: Guest 547 is lost and can't find the exit!
1. Guest 547 Wants To Go Home

Guest 547 is walking.

Guest 547 is walking.

Guest 547 is walking, sees an intersection, and turns.

'I'm thirsty,' Guest 547 thinks.

Guest 547 is walking.

Guest 547 stops at Drink Stall 1.

Guest 547 purchases one beverage from Drink Stall 1.

Guest 547 is walking toward Roller Coaster 2.

Guest 547 stops to take a drink.

Guest 547 continues walking toward Roller Coaster 2.

Guest 547 is in line for Roller Coaster 2.

Guest 547 is in line for Roller Coaster 2.

'This drink from Drink Stall 1 is really good value,' Guest 547 thinks.

Guest 547 is riding Roller Coaster 2.

Guest 547 is riding Roller Coaster 2.

Guest 547 has died!

* * *

"Did you see the distance that one got?" Brett leans back, cackling with glee. "That one train, the last car, flew off the map! Did you see that distance?"

"Amazing," Tyler marvels. "How fast was it going?"

"I think it got up to a hundred. When I did this on another coaster, I got up to one-ten. One-thirty if it's raining," Brett continues.

"A hundred thirty? I've only ever seen things at the maximum height get up to 90," Tyler demures, putting down the natty that they got from Josh. The Natty was warm - Josh never refrigerated the 24-packs he bought for minors. Risk mitigation, this was - Josh was on thin fucking ice as it is, and he couldn't afford the questions that would come with why he had a 24-pack of Natural Ice in the fridge. He could keep a 24-pack hidden as a crate pretty easy, though, and Brett would just need to drive the half mile down Wooster Road to pick it up - from where Josh stood, it was an easy, low-risk way to make some cash. Tyler and Brett couldn't take the risk of cooling them down when Josh got it for them. So room temperature it was.

"No, no, see, I put boosters when it was at the maximum height, got it up to 60 miles an hour, then took it all the way down from 65 elevation down to zero." Brett explained.

"That's amazing," Tyler concurs.

"Right? it was still going up when it left the park! Shit's awesome," Brett marvels. Brett picks up his can, and takes a drink. It doesn't work. His can is empty. He sets it on the compressed wood desk. The aluminum sounds a matte chime on the desk.

Silence falls between Tyler and Brett, with only the chorus of Comfortably Numb blanketing the room. The guitar solo begins. Between texts, Tyler lets some partially in-tune humming break his sinuses. "Oh, shit," Tyler exclaims, "wait, you said it was at 60?"

"What?" Brett replies, clambering over to the 24-pack, secreted to the side of his desk.

"The height, you said, it was at 60 or something, right?" Tyler asks.

"Yeah, couldn't go higher than 65," Brett throws out.

"Right, but that's the 'too high for supports' thing, right? But did you raise the land? Right, cuz you can fuckin just raise the land as high as you want, you don't need any supports at all, you can just go up to the maximum height and don't need any supports." Tyler interjects.

"God, that's fuckin genius. Yeah, I, uh, I think I saved this game before we did this," Brett replies. "We can just go from there."

"Nah, man, delete this coaster, and use that money to remake the coaster. The money you made while building the coaster will still be there, and you'll need it for the land costs, right?" Tyler interjected.

"Yeah, that's right, that's right," Brett replies. "Yeah, let's just demolish it." Brett focuses on the screen. He turns the screen once, and Brett demolishes the ride. "Hey, uh, Tyler, can you take over, you seem like you've done this before," Brett asks as he stands, "my eyes are getting kinda tired."

Tyler puts his phone on the desk. "Yeah, sure," and he takes the computer chair. Definitely softer than the plastic chair he brought in, which Brett lazes into. The computer chair's pretty comfortable, but Brett's back and hip flexors are still tight. Brett tries to stretch while sitting down, arching his back. He doesn't fix the issue, but it's good enough. Brett stretches his neck for a moment, and looks at the desk where Tyler left his phone. Brett picks it up.

"We want to be using a Steel Corkscrew Coaster for this, right?" Tyler asks after demolishing Roller Coaster 2.

"THIS. That letter from hopper just DESTROYED me," Brett recites a text conversation from Tyler's phone.

"What?" Tyler asks, before realizing, "Wait, how'd you get my phone unlocked?"

Brett leans back onto the chair's hind legs, "Gotta lock your phone, man," Brett instructs, before showing Tyler the screen, "but don't worry, man, I drafted your response, you can just send it to Liz whenever."

Tyler reads it. "Motherfucker, give me my phone back." Tyler grabs his phone, and the side of his thumb brushes over the send button. "GODDAMMIT, BRETT."

Brett cackles, "Hey, man, I wasn't the one who sent a text saying 'I'm thirsty.' Least you're honest, man," Brett crows, leaning over to grab another beer, opening it and taking a drink. "So how you gonna reply?"

"What do you mean? 'LMAO sorry about that, Brett's a dick and got got hold of my phone' - Easy enough." Tyler replies. Brett nods vigorously, grinning hostility apparent in his agreement. "The hell ever, man," Tyler says as he pockets his phone. Fair enough, Tyler thinks - not like he himself hasn't done the same. He turns to the screen and demolishes Roller Coaster 2 after grabbing another natty. "This shit's so expensive, man."

"Really? I mean, Josh takes his share, but he's taking a risk, man. Like, Breaking Bad - the drug runners aren't being paid because they're driving, they're paid because they're taking a risk. This drink is really - it's, hah, he's, it's - it's really good value," Brett says, almost keeping it together there.

"Jesus Christ, dude," Tyler mutters, looking at left pocket after feeling a buzz. "I - wait, we demolished this one already, right?"

"Iunno, did you?" Brett giggles. He'd been way more entertained messing with Tyler's phone and watching the chaos unfold. His phone goes off afterward. He stands up to grab it from his nightstand. He picks it up, looks blankly at it for a moment, and starts cracking up. After composing himself, Brett forces out: "Tyler, how'd you do that? That's cool as shit."

"What?" Tyler says, batting down Brett's inquiry, if a little off-put by Brett's outburst. He demolishes Roller Coaster 2, and the screen snaps open the screen for Guest 547. 'I have the strangest feeling someone is watching me.'

"'Guest 547 died!' How'd you send that from the phone number '547'? Is there a website that does that? That's amazing, dude."

"What?" Tyler asks absentmindedly. "My phone's been in my pocket, since I guess I can't leave it out on a counter without someone jumping into it," he says, demolishing Roller Coaster 2.

"Well, good job, whatever you did," Brett grins. "Haven't you demolished that Roller Coaster yet?"

"Dude, I fucking did it twice, I don't know what's going on." Tyler replies, his sloppy frustration rising. Tyler definitely thought he demolished it, but Brett knew that Tyler's word was more a suggestion than a commitment, so Brett wasn't too surprised Roller Coaster 2 was still standing.

"Hey, Tyler, I think we're being haunted," Brett teases, "What if Guest 547 was one of the guys we just killed with the roller coaster? He's here to haunt us from beyond the grave. Like, digitally, though."

"Probably," Tyler deadpans. "Probably the reason why I can't demolish the roller coaster. See, he's right there, on the screen. Can't pick him up, see? Prob'ly haunting us now. See? Can't even see him in his image. Don't wanna scare you, man, but I think he's haunting us now."

A middle-pitched three-beat pulse sounds on Brett's phone. "Again, how are you doing this? It's awesome."

Tyler hears the same pulse on his phone. "What do you mean? Oh, this text message? This is awesome. 'Guest 547 is lost and can't find the exit!' Holy, shit, man. This is really good, Brett. Like, you got it down to the number. 547. No idea how you're doing this, but it's awesome."

Brett was impressed. He knew Tyler was lying, as Tyler was obviously the one who sent the text, so Brett could only admire how convincingly Tyler was committing to this. He asks Brett - "Mind if I take over?"

Tyler grabs his beer. "Thought your eyes were getting tired," he mumbles as he gets up. In truth, Tyler was annoyed with the game right now. He _did_ delete the coaster. If Brett's shitty 2008 Dell wasn't gonna run RollerCoaster Tycoon right, then Brett could handle the damn computer himself. Tyler takes a drink.

Tyler takes a seat on the floor, because his cargo shorts were aggravating his backside. Air conditioning didn't really work in this room. He didn't really like Brett's house - it was always hot here in the summer, and the computer fan didn't help matters. But as long as he got out of his own house, that was what mattered.

Brett takes hold of the mouse and begins his lecture. "Okay, Tyler, here's how you demolish a roller coaster," he says, leaning over his shoulder, before asking, "wait, what're you doing on the floor?"

"Chair's too hot," Tyler responds flatly.

"Ha, yeah, it's really hot in here," Brett agrees, before trying to cobble his patronizing character together as a three-beat pulse rang on Tyler's phone. "Okay, so you, uh, see this trash can here on the screen? Right, that's the demolish button. You see this thing I'm holding? It's called a mouse, and you take your right hand and use your pointer finger to press down on this button here."

Tyler rolls his eyes and looks at his phone. "Right, right, your shitty mouse and computer isn't working, feel free to show me how it's done." He sneers appreciatively at his phone. Tyler has known Brett to be a dick, but he's never really seen him plan things through. "Nice job, dude," Tyler says earnestly, replying to the new text from the 547 number. Brett, who was demolishing Roller Coaster 2 at the time, was taken aback by how earnest Tyler was and lets out a full-bodied laugh. As sarcasm goes, Brett thought that Tyler did pretty well there.

"No, but really, dude, how are you sending these text messages?" Tyler marvels. Brett was clearly playing the game as he sent messages from this 547 phone number. 'He's selling the shit out of this bit,' Tyler thinks.

"What do you mean?" Brett asks, before remembering, "Oh, the 547 ones? Yeah, how are you sending them?"

Tyler was impressed. He knew Brett was lying, as Brett was the one who sent the text, so Tyler couldn't only admire how convincingly Brett was committing to this. A three-beat pulse sounds on his phone.

"How are you doing this, bro?" They ask in unison. While looking back at Tyler, Brett's peripheral vision caught site of an image. "Tyler?" He asks and points, as Tyler turns around.

In relief of the faux wood paneling that lined this room stood the effigy of a man, moving in discrete pixellated fidgets. The man was 9 squares by 20, each about 3 inches in size. Squares, not cubes - not that it registered to either of the alienated, stilled onlookers in this moment, but the likeness before them was entirely two-dimensional. The animate effigy speaks in a voice both familiar and alien.

"I want to go home."

* * *

_Look, sisters and brothers, if there was ever gonna be dialogue in something I write, it was gonna be weird. K-Mart surrealism fits the bill._

_Also - first fic in the RollerCoaster Tycoon category? Nice._


	2. Josh is lost and can't find the exit!

Brett's left cheekbone, under both ice pack and Tyler's guilty gaze, was inflamed but feeling better.

"I..." Tyler stumbled. He was in the wrong. He punched Brett, and he shouldn't have done that. Normally a simple fact to acknowledge, his thoughts at the moment were crabs in a bucket, each dragging the next into the id, each unable to clamber to the fore to be articulated.

"This isn't you. Just - I - you need to fucking swear this isn't you. Just - tell me this ain't you," Brett intones. Brett didn't blame Tyler, to be clear. He started the shoving. After this thing - both of them unable to name it - appeared, each thought that the other was a brilliant executor of the most complicated, well-executed prank in history. This continued, as they stared down this expressionless avatar, checking their phones - sure enough, they both received identical texts from '547' - and Brett and Tyler, both boys of the age, knew that there were no ghosts. Tyler's argument - if we haven't seen ghosts by this point - on Twitter, where *everything* goes viral - resonated with Brett.

Both of these two knew the figure before them - the text messages - were not supernatural. Likewise, Brett and Tyler they were both adamant that they were not the cause of this. Likewise, they knew that they were the only ones to have known about this.

Logical, this conclusion - and if every one of those premises were true, then there wouldn't be an apparently living avatar of a RollerCoaster Tycoon Guest before them. So one of these premises had to be false.

The old computer in the room wasn't even hooked up to the internet - so the likelihood that anyone outside of the room knew of it was nearly zero, and it's not like any of their friends were smart enough to create this illusion. So that one was probably true.

There wasn't any magic in this world. That one was definitely true.

So either Brett or Tyler was lying. Each of them was certain that they didn't do it, so the only conclusion left to Brett was that Tyler was lying; the only conclusion left to Tyler was that Brett was lying. Inarticulate, intoxicated, male youth boiled into shouting almost immediately, which snapped into shoves and shortly thereafter into fists. Tyler happened to throw the first punch, which was the last - but it was by luck and timing alone that it was Tyler who happened to have ascended that emotional peak first.

So it was Tyler's fist that was raw and Brett's cheek which was swollen. And with each of them now convinced that the other was telling the truth, the two were faced with a reality they could not explain: that which was probably an avatar of a RollerCoaster Tycoon Guest, six feet tall, each of the fist-sized 113 pixels making up a body that may as well have been made of enormous Legos, standing before them.

"What the hell does it want," Tyler murmurs. He and Brett were alike terrified. They had no idea whether this being was malicious, but they were in no position to try to grapple with the hypothetical motivations of a being they had no idea _could_ exist until moments before.

"Hell if I know," Brett whispers, wincing. The ice was beginning to hurt more than the punch, so he took the ice pack off his face.

This didn't make any sense. Tyler wouldn't punch him just to keep a prank going. He was telling the truth. Brett's phone sounds in a ringtone he didn't know was installed on his phone – a three-note tone identical to the game's notification sound.

Tyler's phone did the same. "Guest 547 wants to go home," Tyler reads sheepishly. "Is… how is… it's communicating using the game's messages? To our phones?"

Brett read the message off his phone. "Looks that way."

"Jesus," Tyler murmurs. "Jesus."

"He wants to go home – like, what, inside the game? You want to go back into the game? Is that what you want?" Brett asks, compounding his midwestern discomfort with emotional honesty with genuine confusion.

Silence held the room for a moment. The two gazed tentatively at the avatar. He – it – may have been making eye contact with them – it wasn't clear. The resolution was barely enough to illustrate _that the_ figure had eyes, much less where it was looking – neither were certain if they were being watched, but nor could they be certain that they were not, causing both to grow tense.

"You have achieved your objective with a park value of #ERROR!" appears on both the boys' phones.

"The shit – does that mean that we were right?" Tyler growls.

"You have achieved your objective with a park value of #ERROR!"

"Guess so," Brett demures. "What the fuck does it mean, though – I don't know how you got here, I don't – how do we get you back? How do we get you home? We don't know how you got here? Go back, what does that-"

The notification chime interrupts to display the message: "You must not let the park rating drop below 1000 at any time!"

"Which one?" Brett jumps on it, "Arid Heights is like that, right?"

"Yeah, pretty sure," Tyler nods.

"So we just need to beat Arid – wait, 1000?" Brett backtracks.

"You must not let the park rating drop below 1000 at any time!"

"A thousand, that's fucking impossible, you can't get higher than 999, what does this, what the fuck?" Brett rages.

Tyler jumps in, "Wait, so does that mean it's really hard, or –"

"No, it's fucking impossible. You can't do it. The game will literally not allow you to go higher than 999, it's the fucking maximum, some dude hacked it and proved that 999 is the cap, you can't do a thousand, what the fuck is this shit." Brett storms, the pack of ice now sweating on the floor.

Brett spends a moment cursing beneath his breath, baffled, and Tyler marveling at the popcorn ceiling, at a loss for words and thoughts, still feeling guilty for hitting Brett. Their phones ring out: "Josh is lost and can't find the exit!"

Brett stands up, irate, as his phone goes of. "Josh is lost and can't find the exit, what does that, I eman, what does that mean? What, this whole Josh thing, is that another guest, is that, what is that? Who is that? Does that help us keep a five billion park rating, does that, I mean, what the goddamn shit. Why am I asking this goddamn ghost about this," Brett fumes.

Tyler chimes through his dazed melancholy, "Wait, does Josh have something to do with this?"

Brett went silent. "Let's go," he mutters before leaving his room.

Brett had the presence of mind to not drive to Josh's house. He was still properly buzzed and – yes, only a half-mile, but he had no interest in a DUI.

Tyler was the one who punched him, but Brett was by far the more upset about the whole affair. He was having a hard time keeping up – what would have normally been a 15 minute walk turned into a ten-minute walk, and he was buzzed, but his calves still _hurt._ Ow. How mad was Brett?

Guest 547 lingered behind them along the entire way to Josh's house, not changing his appearance, just gliding 20 feet behind them. The wind was a little heavy, but the 2D avatar wasn't shaken by it.

Tyler thought, at least. He was a bit tipsy and having a hard time keeping up. He couldn't really pay that much attention to this ghost.

Brett stopped across the street, three houses from where Josh lived. He had a good vantage of the house from just behind a maple tree in the devil strip – it was 1 AM, after all. Josh's phone immediately went to voice mail.

"You son of a…"

Brett ran across the street toward Josh's house, with Guest 547 trailing shortly behind.

"Uh, Brett? It's, I don't know if this is a good idea," Tyler hangs back, running across the street only once Brett had run and put the distance of peer pressure between them. "Brett, I don't think we should, this is a bad idea."

Not hearing him, Brett strides with oblivion toward Josh's front doo, and while in the driveway, sees car lights pull in. Brett jumps out of the way, and sees a heavy-set man park the car and get out.

"Who's there?" Josh's dad booms, the lawn well-lit enough to see clearly who was there.

"Wait, no, we're here to talk with Josh. Is he here?" Brett recoils, taken aback by this second turn of events. Tyler had tried to warn him this was stupid, for all the good that did.

"Is he – what? No. What? We're looking for him. Do you – he got pulled over for a DUI and got arrested. Do you – wait, do you know where he is?" Josh's dad, whom the boys knew only by sight and by title, quickly turned flustered as the boys.

"He got pulled over? Wait, he's on the run?"

"He apparently escaped out of the back of a cop car. Disappeared just out of thin air. No one noticed he was gone until he just, apparently vanished. Do you know where he went? Do you know what happened to my son?" The middle-aged man was imposing but bargaining with Brett, who was suddenly more dazed than the despondent father.

"No, I… he's not here?" Brett replies confused, looking over at the front door, where Guest 547 was standing.

"No, you don't know anything? I – no, I understand, you don't. Please, if you know anything, let me know. If you don't, please leave," the man says tersely, backing away, walking through Guest 547, into his house. The door closes behind him, Brett sitting in the front yard, trying to stand, Tyler looking on, and Guest 547 existing. The boys' phones crows, with all the malice a three-pulse sound can convey.

"Josh is lost and can't find the exit!"

_Your boy recognizes that all the characters appear to be dudes. Your boy is very sorry about this. Your boy just had to publish something, because he was worried if he went another day without writing something, no matter how shitty, he couldn't live with himself. Your boy got hit with a wave, sudden and long-coming wave of dread, of the fact that he harbors all the interpersonal importance and vividness of a damn NPC, and of the fact that he isn't of use to anyone, so he had to write something._

_Your boy is writing to escape all this. Your boy is sorry for using escapism in any way. And he's very sorry of the basically un-proofread work writing that came of it._


End file.
